The Shuffling Dead Box-set

by Ian Woodhead

  He made a move towards the chain and padlock wrapped underneath the seat then abruptly stopped.

  “What’s the frigging point?”

  That padlock was probably as fake as the fucking bike. Harold sucked greedily on the cigarette and filled his lungs with hot smoke. He desperately needed that nicotine hit to calm his shattered nerves or at least file down a few of those emotional peaks.

  Feeling muggle-headed was a fuck of a sight better than wanting to shove his fist down the next passing stranger’s throat and pull out their pancreas.

  Harold smoked the cig down to the filter in several angry sucks and flicked the end into the middle of the road; he still wanted to twat somebody.

  He stopped himself getting another one out. He’d just have to put up with his non-chilled emotions until he’d sorted that salesman out. Besides, he’d need those for later, Christ knows when he’d be able to afford anymore.

  “That is one serious habit you have there, sonny Jim.” He nodded back to the reflection of the blonde youth in the shop window. Didn’t he know it, he wasn’t fifteen until next August and he already had the dreaded smokers cough every bloody morning.

  His hand crept into his jacket pocket and this time he let it, fuck it. Harold would find some way of getting some more fags.

  Harold wandered over to the main door, lit his next cig and tried the handle, locked of course. He didn’t think it would be that easy. There must be some way of getting inside, if he had to, Harold would put a brick through the window but he’d rather do this quietly.

  He took one last look of his two-wheeled rip off before turning into the alley that separated Roger Huggins’s furniture emporium and the butcher’s shop.

  It had been almost three months since he’s first laid eyes on the new edition in the fat man’s display window. A passing cement mixer had almost wiped him out in his rush to get across the road to examine this shining steed. As he approached the window, Harold kept telling himself that this had to be a mirage. Goods of this pedigree just didn’t find their way into shitty Seeton.

  The saliva in his mouth took a walk as he read the hand-written card leaning against the tyre. So, it had finally happened. A rare gem had finally landed in Roger Huggins’s lap and he hadn’t even realised. The man who’d steal candy from a baby and then try to sell it back to their mother had made a whopping mistake.

  Harold Dunbar knew his stuff when it came to bicycles and he knew a genuine professional BMX when he saw one. It must be worth in the region of six hundred pounds and that fool had marked it up for only two hundred.

  He had placed his head against the cold glass when harsh reality punched through his sugar-coated fantasy of riding that dream bike. Two hundred may as well be two million. There was no chance that he’d be able to find that amount of money. He was just a fourteen year old boy with a ten pound a week paper-round and a bad smoking habit that took all of his cash.

  The alley was a dead-end, he turned back but not before picking up half a brick. It wasn’t his fault; the man had left him with no other choice. He should have left his door unlocked.

  After Harold had handed over his hard-earned cash to the smiling man, he pushed the bike through the village, happier than he’d been in years. It had taken him three months to get that money, twelve weeks of constant lawn cutting, baby sitting and car washing. On top of all that, he’d managed to cut his habit down to just three roll-ups a day.

  He was almost home when the ground-breaking moment happened. He’d paused by the side of the road to roll another cigarette, when the butcher’s delivery van hurtled past him at what seemed like the speed of sound. He watched in horror as his new bike slowly tipped over and fell into the road. He’d been anxious but not too worried; Every BMX nut knew that the paintjobs on these babies could withstand a sandblasting gun. A fall onto the tarmac shouldn’t have even marked it.

  Harold picked it up and saw the tarmac had scratched off a large jagged strip of bright red paint to reveal a dark blue base and hints of letters coloured in white. He used his thumb nail to scratch off a bit more of the red paint. It dawned on him that he’d been had. This was just some cheap knock off BMX that you could pick up for under eighty pounds in a bargain warehouse.

  He looked up and down the high street to make sure nobody was around; then launched the brick at the window. He jumped at the noise; Harold hadn’t expected it to be so loud. No alarms went off, he grinned; Harold didn’t think the shop would be alarmed. Most of the gear that passed through Roger’s hands weren’t exactly legal, he wouldn’t want the police anywhere hear his shop.

  He took off his jacket and wrapped it round his arm then knocked out the remaining glass and climbed through the hole. Harold took out the torch he’d brought for this task and switched it on; he wasn’t daft enough to reach for the light switch; now that would have been fucking dumb. When he first found out that he’d been taken for a ride, Harold wanted to come back here and torch the place. Hurt the bastard where it hurt but then he realised that Harold would lose out too.

  That money what Roger took off him would be gone, that he knew but he should be able to find something in the building of junk that’s worth a bit of cash. He’d need something small and easy to shift. Now he’d broken the window, Roger would know that someone had been in here.

  The door to his left would take him straight into the main showroom. But that was no good, everything in there was massive, stuff like fridges and sofas and other crap like that. Harold passed that door and opened the one next to it; this one took him straight into a storeroom. At either side of him were huge metal shelves just packed with every type of object imaginable. Most of Seeton’s history must be on these shelves. He opened a random box and found it full of old medals. He grinned.

  “I’ve hit the jackpot on the first go, how lucky am I?”

  Harold emptied the medals into his hand and stuffed them into his pocket then he put the box back where he found them. The chances were good that Huggins’s wouldn’t even notice, even if he did, so fucking what? The bastard probably stole them anyway. He decided that it was time to get out of here; this place was beginning to freak him out.

  Harold lifted the torch and played it along the shelves just one more time, he may get lucky again. The beam passed over an old clock a pile of paperbacks and a human mask. Harold shook his head in amusement, you could get lost in here, then the mask opened its eyes.

  The boy shrieked in terror and dropped the torch, through his panic he heard it groan and move. When a fingernail brushed against his cheeks, Harold ran for the door, feeling his bladder letting go. He ran through the broken window and out into Seeton’s deserted high street.

  Chapter Fourteen

  He rushed back up the stairs, straight into his bedroom and slammed the door shut. Good god, he was mad. This was something he really could do without. Just who the fuck did that bitch think she was?

  “Have I gone back in time here? Christ, it’s as if my mum has come back to haunt me. Why do I feel like I’m a naughty kid again?”

  He leaned back against his door, closed his eyes and attempted to calm down. Getting mad at irrelevant rubbish like that jealous old trout being made to feel like gooseberry was just pointless.

  “Don’t you think you have enough on your plate, Dean? Come on, man. Get a grip of yourself.”

  He snapped open his eyes and rushed over to check on his experiment. He’d moved the bedside table into the middle of the floor earlier on and placed an old hamster cage on the top. He’d found it in the loft a few hours ago, it put a smile on his face when Dean stumbled over it, He knew it was up here, at least it was the last time he’d looked. He’d banked on his dad’s habit of never throwing anything away, even if he had, it wouldn’t have been much of a problem getting a new one. The only drawback would have been finding one that would have been sturdy enough. This old thing was constructed decades ago and still stood the test of time, even he would have had trouble bending the metal bars let
alone the animal that he intended to put inside it.

  His mum had bought him this complete with a pet hamster back when he was a kid, Dean couldn’t remember exactly how old he’d been, he guessed either seven or eight. He’d named it Albert, he did remember being so distraught when the hamster had died. His parents promised to buy him another one but had refused, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to take another death.

  Dean had quickly thrown his coat over the top of the cage when his dad called out his name. If dad still only had Gruff for company then he may have disapproved of the experiment but he would not have commented. The addition of some annoying tree-hugging, animal loving save the earth banshee made his dad’s behaviour too unpredictable.

  He had begun to wonder if coming back here had been the wisest of choices. Then again, what other option did he have? According to the reports, the infection had now spread to most of England’s cities. It wouldn’t be long before it reached here too.

  Dean pressed his ear to the door, listening for any sign of either of them following him up. He sighed, not much chance of that really. The woman had worked herself up into a right tizz.

  “Not my concern,” he muttered. “There’s more than her feelings at stake.”

  Dean padded back to his experiment and sat on the bed beside the cage. He’d gone into the village earlier, hoping that the pet shop was still there. In any other place, the stakes would have been stacked against him, but this was Seeton and nothing changed here. He smiled as he stood in front of the shop; it looked exactly how he remembered it, even down to the paint-work. The owner had kept the same colour when he’d re-painted.

  He’d hoped that the shop stocked rats, but the closest he could find were a couple of gerbils. Dean had mentally shrugged, it’s not like he could go anywhere else. He told the man that they were for his son but thankfully, the old guy wasn’t really listening, his eyes were on a group of kids huddled around a large cage containing puppies.

  Dean’s initial optimism took another beating when he pulled the blanket off the cage. There wasn’t much of the animal’s body left to identify it as a gerbil. It must have literally exploded once he’d left the bedroom. Bits of its insides stuck to the inside of the fabric. He’d already prepared the subject first by giving it a small dose of the original solution and the animal’s reaction complied with Gertrude’s. The little bastard almost took off the tip of Dean’s finger when he attempted to inject it with the cure. He picked a piece of bloodied brown fur clinging to one of the bars and examined it in the light of his reading lamp.

  “I must have set the dosage too high. I can’t think of any other reason why the drug should have had such an adverse effect.”

  He cleaned the cage with a few baby wipes, placing the waste in a plastic bag, then padded over to his bedside cabinet and opened the drawer. A tiny head popped out of the gap. The remaining gerbil then ran back into the corner and picked up a sunflower seed.

  “I’ve got a bit of bad news for you, buddy.” He scooped the rodent up and dropped him though the door at the top of the cage. “Your friend met with an accident. Don’t be too alarmed though, I’ll get the dosage right this time.”

  It hadn’t taken Dean that long to discover what had gone wrong at the labs, when he managed to download the last test results. One of their incompetent technicians had mixed up a pair of nucleotides before compiling the final gene sequence. Dean put aside the glaring fact that one of the senior scientists should have double-checked the work before live testing had commenced. It was easier for his conscience to pass on the blame.

  He’d been able to link up to the powerful remote computers to fix the problem and re-run the sequence before the internet failed. By what online news he’d scanned through whilst waiting, he didn’t believe that it would be coming back on anytime soon.

  Several naval ships from over a dozen countries had already begun a blockade and had sunk half a dozen ships trying to escape from England. Apparently, they’d even destroyed two cruise liners. Dean wanted to weep for the vast amount of deaths this mistake was causing.

  He injected the animal with the first solution then padded over to the bedroom window; he had a few seconds before the gerbil would lose control of most of its body functions. Dean saw his dad and the woman hurrying up the garden path just behind a huge bear of a man.

  He’d recognise that broad back anywhere, that was Ken Ellis, Gavin’s uncle. The man owned the dairy farm a few miles from the village. The four of them regularly used to play in the man’s barns and in amongst the old junkyard bordering Ken’s property. Dean would have seen the farm-yard if he’d been paying any attention whilst he was travelling here, the line cut right through his land.

  All three climbed into the farmer’s Land rover and a few seconds later, the vehicle moved off. Dean scratched his head, wondering where they were going now; then he realised that it really wasn’t any of his business. He reminded himself that he was a stranger here now, they’d probably just gone to the pub or something.

  “Why should I really care anyway?”

  All this was distracting him from the important work. Dean hurried back to the bed, staying well away from the creature in the cage, despite his precautions; it threw its body at the bars, desperately trying to grab him.

  Dean prepared the next solution, this time, only making it half the strength. He reached for his other syringe, keeping his attention fixed upon the animal. Its speed seemed to contradict his observations in the lab. The infected human’s movement decreased. Perhaps the mass of the body affected its movement after infection.

  Dean trapped the snarling monster in the corner of the cage with two long pencils and injected the contents into its back. He then rushed over to the door, in case this one exploded as well.

  The animal just collapsed and appeared to die. He stayed where he was and counted to twenty. His optimism joined the gerbil in death. Dean slid to the floor and placed his head in his hands. The spectre of failure hung above his head like a thick, black cloud.

  “Get over yourself, Dean,” he said. “Hiding in a cupboard is not your style. Think, man! There’s nothing wrong with the new solution, you know there isn’t.”

  He got to his feet and checked on the gerbil, it still hadn’t moved, even so, there was no way that he was going to stick his fingers through the bars, just in case. If he had the correct equipment, he could have been able to perform a rough examination of the body.

  There was no chance of that happening, he sighed then got to work, cleaning up the mess. He dumped all the stuff inside the cage and carried everything downstairs. Doing something practical helped to keep his mind from spiralling further into depression. The answer was right there, in front of him. It must be, there must be something he wasn’t taking into consideration.

  He reached the bottom of hall and placed the cage on the floor, stretched his arms and shooed the dog’s inquisitive nose away before lifting it back up and walking into the kitchen.

  He unlocked the side door and carried the cage into the back garden. His intention was to leave the cage in the shed, just for a day or two. Once this was all over then Dean would burn the bloody thing in the garden, he was sure that his dad wouldn’t mind.

  Dean opened the shed door, placed the cage on an old workbench, and closed the door. Heading back to the house, he realised that it couldn’t be a problem with the dosage, Dean had compensated for the animal’s body mass before the injection.

  The dog jumped up to greet him as Dean entered the kitchen; he absently patted the dog’s head then suddenly stopped, “That gerbil was just too small.” He said.

  He needed a larger test specimen. He wondered if those puppies were still in the pet shop, they were an ideal size.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Alison crossed her legs and gazed up into the clear blue sky, it was so peaceful here, unlike the rest of the village, this place brought back only happy memories. The only other people in here with her were a small group of kids,
messing about in the children’s play area. One of them had a large bag of dried dog food and seemed intent on throwing the stuff at his mates.

  She gauged their ages to be around thirteen to fifteen; she wondered where they had found the dog food, probably stolen from the pet shop. Alison remembered getting up to equally stupid japes at their age too. There hadn’t been much else to do in Seeton for Alison and her mates. From what she’d seen, nothing had really changed.

  Before that kid had ripped the bag open, Alison had received more than a few curious glances, whether the looks were admiring or scornful was debatable. Judging from the bouts of giggling she’d heard, Alison guessed on the latter.

  . She smiled to herself, wishing she could have gone back to being that age. Alison would have given her right arm to lose her experiences and memories and go back to having that naïve arrogance and natural optimism that she possessed at that tender age.

  “Before that beast stole them away from me.”

  Alison shivered and decided to go back to the pub where it was a little warmer; maybe she could get something to eat from that takeaway in the centre of the village first. The Rose and Crown did evening meals, but she’d rather not eat at the pub, not with all the locals giving her the odd snide look, wondering who she was. Alison didn’t think it would be that long before at least one of them actually guess.

  She imagined trying to eat her fish and chips in peace, whilst occasionally hearing the who’s that girl phrase thrown around the lounge and games room, treating her like some fucking monkey in a cage, then looking up when someone called out her name – and seeing her parents standing there.

  No, she couldn’t risk discovery, not until she had dealt with that copper. It was a real shame that she had to still behave like a pariah especially considering just how nice that landlady had been to her when Alison finally plucked up the courage to enter the pub and enquire about a room, after she’d left the cemetery.